Employees Are Interrupted Every Two Minutes: James Hewitt on Why Attention Is the New Competitive Advantage

AI is taking on more cognitive work and raising the value of human judgement. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, based on trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 signals and a survey of 20,000 AI users across 10 countries, found that 66% said AI had allowed them to spend more time on high-value work. Half identified quality control of AI output as an increasingly important human skill, while 46% selected critical thinking. Read the Microsoft research.

Those skills require sustained attention, which the modern working day repeatedly fragments. Microsoft 365 telemetry found that the most heavily pinged employees were interrupted every two minutes during core hours, receiving 275 meeting, email or chat notifications across a day.

Microsoft’s Infinite Workday report also found that 60% of meetings among its heaviest meeting users were unscheduled or ad hoc. Research discussed by the University of California, Irvine found that people spend an average of 47 seconds on one screen before shifting their attention, while returning to a project after an interruption can take up to 25 minutes.

Dr James Hewitt is a human performance scientist who helps leaders and teams protect their attention, think clearly and execute under pressure. Formerly Chief Innovation Officer for the coaching company behind 19 Formula 1 World Championships, he applies performance science, live brain monitoring and practical workplace changes to help organizations improve decisions without driving people towards burnout.

In this exclusive interview with The AI Speakers Agency, James explains why working harder can degrade decision-making, how constant task-switching drains attention, and which workplace norms leaders can change to protect focus and sustain high performance.

Question 1: Why does the traditional ‘more effort equals better results’ model fail in modern knowledge work?

Dr James Hewitt: “The biggest misunderstanding about high performance is that high performance is always about more effort. That’s to say that if people just worked harder, cared a bit more and dug a bit deeper, then the results will inevitably follow.

“I get why leaders believe that because it used to be partly true. Originally, in industrial work and factory work, more hours generally equaled more output. Even in knowledge work, spending longer at your desk, certainly in some sectors, did lead to better results.

“But we’re not in factories anymore. Knowledge work has changed profoundly. The product today is about the quality of our thinking. That’s about decisions. It’s about judgement. It’s about our ability to read a room and spot a risk that hasn’t appeared on a spreadsheet yet.

“Those capabilities degrade under sustained high load. They don’t just get a bit worse. Research shows that we don’t just gradually degrade like this old inverted U model. Sometimes those abilities just fall off a cliff. Not gradually, suddenly. It’s like a bridge that looks fine right until the moment it collapses.

“I saw this vividly in Formula 1. I spent years as chief innovation officer for the coaching company behind 19 Formula 1 World Championships, working with teams where decisions made in fractions of a second can win or lose races that are potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

“I learned that the best-performing teams aren’t the ones who push the hardest. They’re the ones who manage their cognitive resources most intelligently. Contrary to popular belief, they’re not always on 100% effort all the time.

“Daniel Ricciardo was in the Monaco Grand Prix in 2016, and it was his first pole position. In Monaco, it’s such a tight circuit. If you qualify in pole position, it’s really your race to lose.

“His team, Red Bull, had practiced the tire change for the pit stop thousands of times, flawless in rehearsal. But under that race pressure, with changing conditions, the system fell apart. The pit stop that should have been about two and a half seconds for Daniel became over 13. That race win vanished.

“That wasn’t an effort problem. That wasn’t because people weren’t trying enough. It was a pressure problem. We never trained for those moments.

“I see that in boardrooms and businesses now. Brilliant people perform beautifully in planning sessions, then fall apart in a Q&A, freeze when the client pushes back or make terrible decisions at 4 p.m. on a Thursday because their brain has been switching all day.

“Most teams don’t fail because they lack talent or because they’re not working hard enough. They struggle because pressure changes how we think, decide and communicate. Most of us haven’t been trained for those moments.”

Question 2: How does task-switching erode cognitive performance, and why should leaders treat attention as a strategic resource?

Dr James Hewitt: “Have you ever finished a really full day at work and thought, “I was busy the whole time, so why do I feel like I’ve not moved the needle on any of my important work?” Most hands go up.

“The challenge is that we’ve become incredibly efficient at being busy. We’ve got more time management tools than any generation in history. But at the same time, there’s a paradox because our feeling of meaningful progress is declining.

“The problem is not related to time. We don’t have a time problem. We’ve got an attention problem.

“You can imagine our attention like a spotlight. Sometimes we say, “I wasn’t paying attention.” That’s not actually true. The question is whether that spotlight is pointing at the right thing, at the right time, with the right intensity.

“The challenge with our average workday is that the spotlight is bouncing around from email to messaging and people saying, “Have you got a minute?” We can fill our entire day without ever doing a single piece of deep, consequential thinking.

“The neuroscience related to this is brutal. Every time we switch contexts or tasks, our brain doesn’t just flick a switch. It has to dump one mental workspace, load another, then reconfigure and reorientate.

“Some research indicates that, when we switch tasks, it can take about 23 minutes to get back up to speed on the original task. Other research indicates that we’re interrupted at work and have to switch tasks over 200 times a day. It’s every few minutes.

“The bottom line is that we’re spending more time recovering from interruptions than doing the work.

“I sometimes use live brain monitoring in my keynotes. It measures your brain activity in real time. It’s neurotechnology that I’ve used with F1 teams and elite athletes, and you can see that switching cost in real time.

“I can get an audience member up on stage. When I distract them, you see a spike in their cognitive load, a decrease in attention metrics, and their stress response activates. It’s visible. It’s measurable. Unfortunately, it’s happening in our teams hundreds of times every single day.

“Research suggests that redesigning knowledge work to facilitate focus could be worth about $468 billion a year to just five sectors in the US economy. The bottom line is that it’s worth billions across the world.

“This isn’t a well-being issue, it’s a competitive advantage issue. When leaders tell me that their people just need better time management, my response is that their people can probably manage their time just fine.

“What they need is an environment that protects their most valuable resource: their attention. That’s what will make their best work possible.”

Question 3: Which workplace norms cause the greatest damage to focus, and how can leaders redesign them?

Dr James Hewitt: “The answer is hiding in plain sight. It’s not the big, obvious things. It’s the small habits that nobody questions because that’s just how we work here.

“The first is what I call meeting creep. If someone books a 30-minute meeting, somehow it runs to 30 or 45 minutes. Then someone else books the next one, and suddenly we’ve got back-to-backs.

“By Tuesday afternoon, you’ve got a leader calendar that is a solid wall of meetings, with no thinking time or breaks between them. Then they sit back and wonder why their strategic plan hasn’t moved in three months. You can’t think strategically or see the big picture in the two minutes between the budget review and the client escalation.

“The second issue is what I call false urgency culture. Particularly with email, we’ve created a culture of false urgency, which means that we treat email like instant messaging.

“When every message feels like it needs an immediate response, nothing is truly urgent anymore, but everything feels like it is. I’ve worked with teams where people reply to emails within minutes all day long.

“There’s data indicating that 84% of us keep our email inboxes open in the background at all times. The average email is read and sometimes responded to within minutes of receiving it. Some 42% of people admit to processing email in the bathroom.

“The problem is that we convince ourselves this is productivity. It’s not. It’s focus-destroying. It erodes that precious resource: attention.

“We believe it’s productivity, but it’s actually responsiveness. Sometimes it’s what I call productivity theatre. We feel the need to look busy by being responsive rather than focusing on being truly productive.

“The third norm quietly destroying focus is rewarding presence over output. It also relates to productivity theatre.

“The person who is first in and last out often gets a reputation as a high performer, even if they spend half their day on low-value activity. Meanwhile, the person who produces outstanding results gets the side-eye for leaving at 5 p.m.

“In Formula 1, they don’t confuse being busy with performing well because the data are too clear. A trackside pit-stop team either took two and a half seconds or it took 13. No one cares how hard you appeared to try.

“Businesses need to learn from this and get more honest about the difference between activity and output.

“The fix isn’t complicated. It’s about simple team norms, perhaps giving people permission to have meeting-free blocks where they can truly focus and agreeing response windows.

“One company I worked with set email signatures explaining its email-checking times. It used five blocks during the day, followed by urgent communication alternatives: a phone number people could ring or a WhatsApp they could send if their issue was truly urgent.

“It’s amazing how many emails ended up not being sent because of that. The team saved over an hour per day with a series of communication-efficiency techniques we put into practice.

“Some data indicate that, when we can focus uninterrupted, we work about 30% faster and with less stress. By integrating some of these efficiency techniques and providing time for deep focus, we can reclaim hundreds of hours a year.

“Someone has to name the problem first.”

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This exclusive interview with Dr James Hewitt was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.